Intute: from a distributed network to a unified database – lessons learned

Abstract

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/) catalogues and describes the best Internet resources for education and research. It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and is primarily aimed at evaluating web resources suitable for undergraduate study. The service also offers Internet research skills tutorials, rss feeds of new resources added to the catalogue, a personalisation service (MyIntute), and a blog highlighting trends in Internet research skills and particularly good or topical subject-based resources. The current Intute catalogue of Internet resources is an aggregation of records from eight subject services previously funded by the JISC as the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). This paper describes the process and challenges of integrating these eight databases into one unified catalogue with one standard metadata schema, whilst continuing to satisfy the needs of different subject communities. The paper also outlines a current project to evaluate and compare the cost-effectiveness of manual and automatic metadata creation.